PR in "a Small World"

I had a male coworker at Aflac who was like one quarter or one half Cherokee and looked it. No clue anymore what his name was.

He had been an EMS worker for a lot of years and then -- if I recall correctly -- made it a goal to get a job at Aflac. Pretty much ANY job there.

Aflac actually hires a lot of people with prior medical experience of some sort, so he got an entry level claims processing job like I got. Unlike me, he had goals for his career there and a game plan.

I got a job at Aflac because my mom suggested I apply, so I applied online and they called me and said "You qualify for these three positions. Which are you interested in?"

I was going through a divorce, living with relatives, very ill and had almost no prior work experience, so I basically said "The two you said offer an evening shift." because I had trouble getting up in the morning and also didn't want to compete with others in the house for an early morning shower.

So I drove to their gated nondescript grey building in Columbus that looked like something out of a spy movie to take some placement tests. To my horror, I was there forever while everyone else left before me.

I sat there feeling like I must be EXTREMELY slow and stupid that I was the absolute last person to finish testing for the day. God, I'm a LOSER.

The tester laughed about that. I was there longer because I was taking more tests for more positions.

Then I was told that after testing, I qualified for both positions I had expressed interest in. And she asked me which one I wanted.

I had never had a full-time paid job and didn't know how to pick which one of the two would be best for me, so we talked a bit. I ultimately chose claims in part because the job started two weeks earlier and I was losing my marbles staying with relatives and wanted a place of my own.

I later spent an hour shadowing someone at the other job and concluded I made the right call. But it was kind of a shot in the dark. My understanding of what each of the jobs entailed was practically non-existent.

Anyway, this guy was on my team, he was part Cherokee so he actually talked with me unlike most people there and at one point his cubicle was like right next to mine, so I overheard things that got said. And I was fascinated because I had no FUCKING clue how this career stuff worked.

So one day someone walked up to his cubicle and said they had heard he was interested in a specific position in the department and they needed people for that position. 

I couldn't make head nor tails of the job listings and couldn't figure out how internal hiring worked. How the hell he knew what was available and how to work the system -- seemingly without even actually applying for it through proper channels -- I had no clue.

I never did figure out how to successfully climb the corporate ladder and eventually quit. But this brief conversation at his cubicle that I overheard was food for thought for me for years about things in my life and my sister's life which I hashed out at length with my sons to finally develop a mental model for how that happened.

My sister and I both had a goal of getting out of our hometown. I succeeded better than her even though she ended up with a real career and I was a homemaker for a lot of years.

I got married at 19 to another 19 year old whose only career goal was military service and I supported that. I explicitly told him "The army can send you back to Columbus but it can't send me. I will divorce you. I married you to get the hell out of there."

At some point, an army buddy of his offered to get him assigned to Fort Benning, the large military base there. And my husband declined.

My introverted, socially awkward husband was more able to navigate the social landscape of having a career than I was even though I prided myself on being socially aware and observant.

Part of that conversation went roughly like this:

"I can help you get assigned to your hometown so you live near your relatives."

"No thanks. That violates the Thousand Mile Rule."

"What?"

"I have in-laws there."

"Dude, that's cold."

"That's my WIFE'S rule. Are you trying to get me divorced?"

My ex NEVER got assigned to Fort Benning -- "home of the infantry" -- even though he was career infantry and repeatedly went there for school. I was fine with crashing with relatives short term when he was in school. I was not fine with living there for years, though I ended up going home again during my divorce which is how I ended up at Aflac for some years.

He never got assigned there in spite of a long history of trying to work the system -- a system he knew well -- to try to go where he wanted and consistently failing.

We were already married when he joined the army and both our fathers were career army. At our first duty station, his lieutenant was concerned about a young married guy fresh out of Basic Training and tried to get him hooked up with resources. To his shock, we were already taking advantage of everything the lieutenant wanted to suggest plus a few he hadn't heard of himself.

At our second duty station, the ex called some number to try to influence where he went. He was told it was too early and call back next week. The next week he was told it's too late, you've been assigned already.

At our third duty station, he got orders for a special assignment elsewhere. We owned a house and the schools were good and he didn't want to go and his boss didn't want him to go because his gunnery score was perfect.

He fought it one or more times and was told "Needs of the army. Pack and go." He came home one day and said there was one more thing he could try: claim financial hardship because we owned a house there.

I told him he wasn't going to tell the army he wasn't competent to manage his personal life. So he took the assignment.

His next assignment was not actually at a military base and effectively "in the boonies" with regards to military stuff such that I completely unintentionally memorized a bunch of info from having to call and check info all the time because we got notifications so late. 

Given that situation, he called that line he previously called several MONTHS before his assignment was supposed to end only to be told "Dude, you already HAVE orders. You should be clearing already."

He tried to fight that too which also didn't fly. 

So he basically lived under some black cloud of perpetual bad luck with trying to influence where he went and yet he NEVER got assigned to the "home of the infantry" while being career infantry, the one base you would guess he would end up at some point.

Probably because of that one conversation with a buddy of his. 

The Army is a small world. Probably word got round to the people who made assignments that assigning my husband to Fort Benning would get him divorced, so they unofficially had a policy of not pointlessly screwing him.

My sister managed to go off to college elsewhere in Georgia at the tender age of seventeen -- I was nearly twenty one when I finally got out of town -- but never got out of Georgia and still lives there.

And she never got out in spite of taking a federal job that involved months of training which required her to sign papers agreeing to go ANYWHERE they sent her after they spent months and buckets of money training her.

She got assigned to a location in Georgia like an hour from where she had been living. Friends of hers went to California and other far flung locations.

Federal civil service jobs aren't like joining the military. The military owns your ass and relocates you regularly.

Federal civil service jobs are more similar to civilian jobs: After that initial assignment, that job in that place was her job and wouldn't change without her intentionally job hunting.

So that was her one shot at having the federal government SEND her elsewhere and she initially bragged about how brilliant she was, in anticipation of finally leaving Georgia like she had been wanting from like age 12 or so when she was all "When are we MOVING again Mom???" And finally had it explained "Uh, we're NOT. Your dad retired from the army. We bought this house. We aren't ever moving again."

She also essentially bragged to me and probably other people that if they sent her to some far flung place, this would force her husband to follow her there and she framed it like it would humiliate him or something like that.

This was at a time when men were supposed to be the primary breadwinner and women's careers were still strident feminist things and etc.

I think she wanted very much to go elsewhere, hoped that taking this federal job would "force" the situation so our family and his couldn't object and didn't know a better way to talk about it.

I think she was processing. She was talking it out to whomever would listen as a form of therapy to help her cope with wanting this, arranging it and knowing that both families would likely be critical of him following her career.

So I think probably she talked about this at school to classmates or whatever and one or more instructors overheard this and they did the same thing for her that the Army did for my husband: Chose to not pointlessly screw her if they didn't need to send her elsewhere.

Only that was actually what she wanted: For someone else to "make" her go over the objections of the relatives.

Most boys seem to learn something before they are adults which prepares them to navigate a career. A career involves a relationship to the public and navigating that effectively amounts to understanding PR -- Public Relations -- and that's a memo my sister and I and most women seem to not get.

Regardless of your gender, if you don't have a clear mental model regarding the social landscape and how to effectively put out the word and how to not share the wrong kinds of information, your odds of succeeding at business are poor.

And hopefully the above anecdotes cast some light on how such things work.